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count() (Score:1)

by Abigail (26)

count(expression) counts the number of times expression is not NULL. Which explains your answer. I always use 'count(*)' if I want to count the number of rows - several databases have optimized 'count(*)'. Others use 'count(1)' to count rows.
- Re:count() (Score:2)
  
  by jdavidb (1361) on 2006.10.02 15:30 (#50677) Homepage Journal
  
  The only two incantations of COUNT() I have used that worked the way I expected were COUNT(*) (to count rows) and COUNT(DISTINCT field) (to count distinct values of a field, and even then I'm not sure what it does with NULL). This is with Oracle; with other RDBMSes YMMV. I'm sure there's some magic I could do with COUNT(field) and COUNT(field1, ..., fieldN), but I don't know how it works. I may have done that in Oracle class or database class at the university, but I didn't retain any information on how to get it to work (or even what it's supposed to do).
  
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  J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
  
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